In the United States, buildings consume a tremendous amount of natural resources and are a major contributor to the carbon footprint and water footprint of cities. There is a great opportunity to optimize the management of energy and water while meeting the needs of the multitude of different users of commercial and industrial buildings. From EPA 2009 data, buildings account for 39% of energy used, 68% of electricity consumed and 38% CO2 emissions. Building managers face significant pressures requiring them to efficiently manage energy consumption including corporate profit pressures coupled with increasing & volatile fuel costs, corporate sustainability top-down directives mandating carbon-reporting, GHG reductions, and usage of renewable energy sources, and building regulations mandating benchmarking and improvement programs.
The need for new automation solutions to aid in the optimum use of these natural resources is significant given the uneven state of current building automation, with estimates of approximately 14% of commercial buildings having a building management system (BMS) or building automation system (BAS) in place according to Pike Research. Where BMS or BAS systems are in place, the mode of operation of building resources is typically reactive management of heating, cooling ventilation and a portion of lighting based on schedule and reacting to set-points being exceeded. There is a significant opportunity for efficiency gains through shifting to proactive management based on demand forecasts and utilizing rich real-time data on building operation and disturbances such as weather, occupancy, etc. Also, expanding the scope of proactive management from heating and cooling to a more complete integration of lighting controls and other building subsystems including a variety of technologies and strategies available for meeting customer comfort with less energy consumed.
Opportunities also exist to apply a proactive approach of predictive demand forecasts leading to optimization to additional areas such as water consumption planning/management, ensuring ventilation requirements are met (especially for areas such as labs that have more stringent or regulatory requirements) and management of ancillary plug load capacity, which may be broken out separately for the data center.
Another area of opportunity is for improved integration of the different approaches in use for energy management in a building, with facilities management often pursuing separate and sometimes conflicting strategies for energy efficiency programs to reduce base load/energy costs, demand response participation with both voluntary and mandatory commitments to utilities, use of on-site generation and storage technology, etc. Together with the increasing number of energy management approaches in place there has been an increase in different priorities for energy management: reduce overall energy costs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions/carbon impact, increase use of on-site and renewable energy resources, and generate revenue from sale of energy or participation in demand response programs. There is an opportunity for technology to give customers a way to take a holistic view of the entire envelope of energy management approaches in place and use an objective analysis to incorporate business priorities to generate an integrated energy management strategy.
Lastly there is an opportunity for the new energy management solutions envisioned to be supported by a software infrastructure that provides integration across disparate building monitoring and control systems (e.g. HVAC, lighting, plug load, etc.) and different real-time and historical data sources (e.g. weather data, rate and price data, occupancy data, peer building usage data, etc.) to enable real-time recommendations or control actions based on rich real-time data as well as planning based on predictive demand forecasts.